Wintersun - Time II

Imagine there's a pic of the album art on the left because Blogger is refusing to let me upload images right now

Feel free to skip this first paragraph, it is admittedly self-indulgent and tangential, but I feel like the best way I can explain Time II and my feelings on it is through a punchline that requires a bit of setup.  A big early inspiration of mine when it came to reviewing was Noah Antweiler, better known as The Spoony One, an OG "angry internet reviewer" whose content has, by and large, aged like milk.  Despite no longer finding it funny to change the lyrics of "Liberi Fatali" from Final Fantasy VIII to all be variations of "gay" and "sissy", I actually still hold his three-part review of the game Ultima IX: Ascension in pretty high regard for almost entirely metatextual reasons.  The review itself is ostensibly just a joke and skit laden diatribe against a game he really hates from a series he had previously really loved, but the review functions in hindsight as something of a character study of a man whose manic period finally climaxed and began to flip into a depressive period at the exact same time as the consequences of his flippant, selfish behavior during his manic years came home to roost.  The real-life circumstances of his life that had taken a major downturn in between the filming of each part weighs so heavily on him that you can see him physically and mentally decay with each new installment.  He visibly loses weight, his criticisms become less about ticky-tack mechanical nitpicks and more about overarching philosophical failures, and he lashes out at the world in a way that is explicitly reflective of his lived reality, where his own behavior cost him his job, reputation, and friends and his struggle to reckon with that.  It's a captivating watch if you're familiar with his self-destructive backstory.  The part that's important here, and one of the pivotal moments in his own filmed meta-collapse, comes during a section where he describes a sidequest in the game.  At one point, he is tasked with scouring the world to find four gemstones.  They are scattered all across the world map, with little to no direction as to where to even start looking to find any of them.  It takes nearly the entire length of the game to complete and requires a huge load of backtracking.  After spending dozens of hours replaying a game that is already miserable to play, a game that symbolizes his personal loss of childhood wonder and the most potent, soul-destroying disappointment he had ever experienced, just to fetch all of these items, the reward is revealed to be a measly 100 gold pieces.  Less money than he could have made by simply turning around and stabbing a rat in a random encounter.  It would have been less insulting if the reward was simply nothing at all.

What can you possibly say about Time II?  No, that's not a rhetorical question.  What can you, I, or anybody else on Earth say about the substance of this album that is of any value to yourself, myself, or anybody else on Earth?  I need to lay my thesis out right at the start here.  Reviews are, by nature, subjective critiques of art.  They necessarily must be so because a review is predicated on having an opinion about something.  I am frequently criticized for being too subjective in my writing, and that is not going to change today, but the core problem with Wintersun's long awaited new album is actually an objective one.  You can not refute this, you can not say I am incorrect or misinformed, you can not claim I am interpreting the facts uncharitably to make an unfair point, there is absolutely no coherent counterargument to this 100% indisputable fact: Time II is the second half of an album that was released 12 years ago and written 18 years ago.

That's it, right?  Like, what the fuck else can you or I or anybody else on Earth amend on to the end of that statement that softens the cold haymaker of reality here?  Time II is an album that fundamentally can not be divorced from the surrounding non-musical circumstances of its creation and release.  And the most distilled version of those circumstances is "This album was written and at least partially recorded in 2006, five songs were released in 2012, and six more were released in 2024".  Everything experiential about this album will forever be colored by the looming shadow of the previous eighteen years.

Why talk about how "Way of the Fire" is an okay song that goes on a little too long when the fact is that it's been written and performed live for eons by this point?  Why talk about "Silver Leaves" being one of the exceptionally few examples of Jari writing slower parts that are actually engaging on some level when the fact is that fans have endured ten straight years of him caterwauling about how no computer exists that could fully realize what is so nakedly a perfectly unremarkable symphonic melodeath song?  Why talk about how much of the runtime is occupied by atmospheric intros/interludes/outros when the fact is that the band raised hundreds of thousands of euros to do so?  Why talk about the mix being fine for what it is if a little bit crowded when the fact is that the album's production is the entire impetus of several rounds of fundraising and empty promises and there is apparently already a cleaner mix available if you purchase it for forty bucks from the band directly?  Who cares what happens in "Storm"?  The fact is that it's the penultimate song on an album that spent more time in the polishing stage than my dog's entire natural fucking lifespan and at the end of the day all that got delivered was a pretty fine if sorta unfocused album in a genre that had iterated itself beyond any boundaries that Time could've theoretically pushed two god damned decades ago.  Who cares?  Brymir released four different versions of this already and they weren't all that spectacular either.

It seems wrong, but it's just true, the actual substance of the album just full stop does not matter.  At the end of the day, it's the second half of an album that was released 12 years ago and written 18 years ago.  I'll keep saying it, because it absolutely bears repeating.  There is absolutely nothing this album could've done that could've justified the slow-motion circus fire that led up to it.  Time's legacy was never going to be its music, it was always going to be its story.  The worst thing it could've done was conclude that story, because now we're forced to reckon with the fact that fans could've heard this in 2008 like it was initially planned and nothing would be fundamentally different about it.  With that in mind, are you pleased with this result?  Is Time II worth at least a few percentage points on principle because the instruments are in tune and the growls sound good?  Of course not, this isn't a physics exam, it's a piece of art, and it's art that I find spectacularly artless and unworthy of merit.  Do you really care that "Ominous Clouds" is a filler interlude or that Jari's clean vocals are still goofy as hell?  I don't think you do.  I think you care that Time II is finally released and yep it sure sounds like half of a Wintersun album.  Hope that's enough for ya!

Perfect is often the enemy of good but it turns out that it can be the spectre that mediocrity spends a lifetime promising as well.  I used to champion the belief that Jari was a conman who had been sitting on his ass and demanding money for years, but I no longer believe that.  No, the only remaining possibility is that he must be an idiot.  To spend so much of your limited time on this planet spit-shining a turd that you shit out back before X-Men 3 came out is the choice of a gibbering lunatic.  I fully believe that he spent all of this time futzing around with DAWs and tweaking the levels of three hundred simultaneous fake trumpets because these songs sound like they haven't gone through a second pass since the Younger Bush administration.  It doesn't sound lazy, you don't invest so much of your reputation on an album that you refuse to release until its perfect if you weren't actually trying.  But it ultimately sounds dated on arrival.  You can't dazzle me with nine straight minutes of blastbeats or bombastic synths anymore because the world moved on while you were busy dazzling yourself in your imagination with a hypothetical version of it.  This is what happens when you're so incurious that you assume your artistic whims are unimpeachable.  The intervening years weren't spent reworking or rewriting these songs, they were spent trying to make the noises in Jari's headphones match what he envisioned in his head twenty years ago.   That these songs never stopped being an animating force in his artistic career is not a sign of perfectionism or creative drive, it's a sign that the creator assumed any possible improvement could only be achieved via means completely disconnected from their fundamental building blocks.   That's not the action of a genius, it's the action of a child who refuses to finish their drawing until they find the exact perfect shade of blue crayon.  It's like winding up a punch for 155,000 hours as though that's going to make it land 155,000 times harder when really all it accomplishes is making you look like a fuckin' clown.

Is this good enough for you?  Is this worth all of the time and effort it took to realize?  Does this album sound like it was worth a half million dollar paywall that took a decade to unlock?  If so, I'm genuinely happy for you.  I don't understand you and will not value any artistic insights you offer, but I am glad that this makes you happy.  Time II could've come bundled with a gold ingot and Sofia Vergara's phone number and it would still be the second half of an album that was released 12 years ago and written 18 years ago.  Nothing will ever assuage the fact that it would've been less insulting if it was never released at all.

RATING: 0%

My 2023 AOTY was Xoth by the way.

Winds of Plague - Blood of My Enemy

GO AWAY

I've found myself oddly attracted to Adrienne Cowan lately.  No no, I don't mean like I'm stalking her or anything, just that I've found her presence on otherwise bland records to be really welcome.  Light & Shade is a fairly bland power/pop metal band but her wild shrieking that she punctuates nearly every song with quite liberally in stark contrast to her otherwise sweet voice helped give the album a bit of an identity.  Her main band, Seven Spires, is interesting but tends to whiff on execution, with their full length debut this year, Solveig, making the bizarre choice of rerecording the entire earlier EP and sticking it at the front of the album, creating a weird and disjointed experience that starts off underdeveloped and suddenly shifts into a decently okay Kamelot album at the halfway point when the new songs finally start.  The worthy thruline within that experience is once again Cowan, with her soft coos contrasting wonderfully with her insane Doroisms.  She has real personality in her voice, and it helps these otherwise middling albums become quite listenable.  She's looking in line to be the next Jorn Lande; a great vocalist who constantly finds himself in boring bands that he almost single handedly saves from being worthless with alarming regularity.  I feel like I'll be following her career at least mildly attentively in the near future.  I wonder if she's got anything else in the pipeline?

*checks her artist profile on MA*

OH GOD SHE'S IN WINDS OF PLAGUE NOW WHY GOD WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS??

*socks blow across the room*

So in all honesty, I thought Winds of Plague was dead at this point.  I was reviewing their discography as it was released a few years ago out of some sense of odd fascination/obligation, but by the time Resistance rolled around I just couldn't bring myself to give a shit.  That one was a lame hardcore album with synths popping in occasionally, if nothing else I give them credit for finally picking a style and sticking to it, it just wound up being the one they're the worst at.  After this the band went quiet and just disappeared from my radar completely.  So now four years have passed and the entire lineup has been replaced apart from the vocalist, and Blood of My Enemy has quietly dropped, and it's... kinda good?

This band pisses me off so much, they seemingly can't nail down their strengths for the life of them, but this is their second album now (the other being The Great Stone War) that actually manages to be fairly solid despite their ever present songwriting woes.  Instead of the endless idiotic genre hopping marred by some of the worst lyrics ever penned, this one focuses mostly on epic atmosphere with chugging melodeath riffs helping things along without being intrusively stupid.  The main strength of Blood of My Enemy is simply that it's not awful, which is admittedly a pretty terrible benchmark to work towards.  You can get the gist of the album after the first track, "Nameless Walker".  It starts of with some killer blast beats and punctuated keys, sounding exactly like the kind of band I always wished they'd become, but near the end it just devolves into slow non-riffs with sweeping keys over the top with gang shouts piercing through occasionally.  That's what most of the album is, slow non-riffs with needless keys.  They're back to trying to do everything at once, though not nearly as sloppily as they were on Decimate the Weak.  So you get a band trying to be epic through the lens of hardcore, which just a completely different approach to how metal does it, and it ends up being wonky and stupid most of the time.  The gang shouts and brochoirs are just out of place and weird every time they show up.  Even weirder is that, paradoxically, they sorta fit perfectly, because no other style of vocal would fit there.  It's just kind of a testament to how they're still peddling a style that just fundamentally doesn't work.

I lead into this talking about Cowan, but she really doesn't have any real effect on the band beyond a short vocal spot in the title track.  In fact, I don't know if any of them do, because it was almost entirely the same band that released The Great Stone War, the one oddly okay one, in between all the terrible albums.  Every last one of them has been replaced barring ol' Johnny, and yet here we are reverting back to the sound of an album that was already notably different.  This boils down to me assuming that, throughout everything, he must be The Guy behind the band, and whichever sound they decide to focus on depends entirely on what kind of mood he's in come writing time.  As a result, even though this focuses on atmosphere more than any others, there are still some straggling hardcore-isms.  The most notable offender is "5150", which is basically a random ass Slipknot song shoehorned into the album, and "Dark Waters" and "Snakeskin" do the same thing in spots, with the former finally giving way to the kind of massive dumbass breakdown the band is so fond of and did such a good job of holding back from throughout the album's runtime. 

Overall it's just... odd and disjointed, which has always been the band's problem, but it's a little bit more cohesive here.  It's best summed up as The Great Stone War with more chugs and less melodeath.  Which doesn't sound great, and in truth it's really not, it's just middling and forgettable.  For most bands this is almost worse than just being flat out bad, but with Winds of Plague it's actually commendable for how remarkably awful their worst albums are.  When it comes to this band, a weak and forgettable release is a huge step up from an actively annoying trainwreck.  So they've failceeded once again.  Congratulations?


RATING - 49%

Wintersun - The Forest Seasons

The Borest Seasons

I mean, we all knew this was coming.  I had to review this, screeching about Jari Maenpaa is pretty much my entire claim to fame at this point.  So yeah, this is being written purely out of obligation, because I don't want to.  Not because I have to eat crow over guaranteeing this would suck and I wound up wrong or something, because this does suck.  It's just sucky in a slightly different way than usual.

Y'see, The Forest Seasons is, to put it lightly, boring as shit.  There are a few neat things about it, and like always, Jari is at his best when he's just throwing caution to the wind and being as huge and grandiose as he possibly can, but the problem is that there are startlingly few moments like that to be found here.  Don't get me wrong, this album is big, but it's not really exciting in any way.  That's really the album's biggest flaw, there's just... very little here.  The few good tracks they've put out over the agonizingly long years ("Beyond the Dark Sun", "Winter Madness", "Sons of Winter and Stars") all have a few things in common.  They're all blisteringly fast, massively bombastic, loaded with either flashy guitar theatrics ("Beyond the Dark Sun"), over the top orchestrations ("Sons of Winter and Stars"), or both ("Winter Madness").  All the shitty songs (every other song Jari has touched since leaving Ensiferum) are plodding and dull and go nowhere.  Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, ya know?  There are no good songs on The Forest Seasons.  They're all the latter type of song that seems to just fucking drag on and on and on and never actually go anywhere or do anything exciting.

I've always said the reason Wintersun is so frustrating is because Jari is seemingly incapable of writing to his strengths.  He's really good at super fast and super melodic magniloquence.  Similar to how Dio only works when there's some semblance of mysticism behind him, Jari only works when he's powering forwards with pomp and energy.  What he's not good at is atmosphere.  He simply has not managed to write a song throughout the two decades he's been in the spotlight that built itself on sounding like it was greater than itself.  He tries to throw hundreds of layers of strings and keys and horns and anything else he can think of but none of it ever amounts to anything.  Wintersun is deceptively shallow, and this album sort of lays it all bare for the listener to realize.  Beyond all that flash and guitar wizardry, there's very little solid songwriting.  "The Forest that Weeps" is a great example, as it's sort of a metaphor for the entire album. It boasts a choir section that features some heavy hitters like Heri Joenson, Markus Toivonen, and Mitja Harvilahti, but when you look at the rest of who is featured you see it's filled with nobodies like some random dudes who played in Norther, the bassist of Ensiferum who left around the time Jari did, and pretty much every single member of Turisas.  That's The Forest Seasons and pretty much Wintersun's entire career in a nutshell.  A couple great moments surrounded by a veritable horde of "who the fuck cares?" 

There are good moments scattered around.  I genuinely think the final two and a half minutes or so of "Awaken from the Dark Slumber" are great, and there's a fast section around four and a half minutes into "Eternal Darkness" that is pretty sweet, but that's like four minutes out of 54.  That choir in "The Forest that Weeps" sings a really bland stanza that sounds like it doesn't fit into the song at all, and it's no better when Jari sings it solo.  And rounding out the group is the token quasi-ballad, "Loneliness", that just drags the fuck on and on and progresses precisely zero inches from the starting line by the end.  90% of the album is mid paced and droning, even when the drums are blasting.  I'll give the dude some props for stepping outside of his comfort zone and trying something new, but it didn't connect at all.

Jari is a bullshit artist of the highest order, but one thing he absolutely did not lie about was that this is a much more "earthy" and subdued album than the two preceding it.  There's a surprising amount of meloblack influence (particularly in "Eternal Darkness") and it's much more guitar based than the booming symphonics we've grown to expect.  And in theory, the idea of Wintersun ditching the overblown symphony is a really cool prospect, because "Beyond the Dark Sun" rules fucking divine and it's all about the guitars on that one.  The thing is that the opener from the self titled is super kinetic and succinct.  It had a point to make and so it made it quickly and effectively.  Nothing on The Forest Seasons is done quickly or effectively.  Everything is dragged on to marathon lengths, as all four tracks fall between 12 and 15 minutes, and it's just a chore to sit through attentively because it just sounds like he's throwing a surprisingly thin amount of ideas at you and just trying to impress you with the sheer amount of it.  It's so odd, it's like the band is simultaneously doing too much and too little at the same time.  It's darker than before, yes.  It's heavier than before, yes.  It's better than before?  No.

I genuinely can't decide if this is the best or worst Wintersun album, because it comes off as both.  On one hand, the darker approach is a welcome change, as it sounds more sad and hopeless than the puffed up nonsense of their usual fare.  On the other hand, it's pretty much boring the entire way through with no random highlights like "Winter Madness" to make the album worth coming back to.  But in that respect, it means it's easily the most consistent album they've written to date, but that also means it's just consistently boring.  What's more frustrating?  An album full of lame songs with one or two great ones that end up being tragically miscast on an otherwise dull album, or an album that's consistently bland the entire way through and ending up pointless overall?  I guess "Eternal Darkness" is alright but it's pretty much just a bizarro version of "Battle Against Time", with its endless blastbeats and tremolo picking, played twice in a row.  It's almost commendable to cram so much content into four songs and yet make all of it so inconsequential and unmemorable.  That was always Wintersun's problem, but they'd usually fluke out and nail it at least once per album.  Not this time, this one whiffs pretty much the entire time.

I'd say it's a shame, but not really.  Wintersun continues to be this weird bastard hybrid of Nickelback and Kpop.  Nickelback because they're not necessarily offensively bad, just really, unbelievably, excessively lame, and Kpop because it all sorta sounds the same and follows an obvious template with very few tricks, but fans are absolutely fucking wild in their unending devotion to mediocrity. 

Whatever, Wintersun exhausts me nowadays.  This is what happens when all of your efforts goes towards production values (which are great, by the way) at the expense of songwriting.


RATING - 25%

Mastercastle - Wine of Heaven

zzzzzzzz

Man I don't know shit about this kind of metal, but I know that it's boring and worthless.  Mastercastle waste no time telling you that they're going to waste your time, because it's a mere fifteen seconds into the opening "Drink of Me" that they give you the first taste of their riffwriting prowess, or more accurately their lack thereof.  Mastercastle's biggest failing is without a doubt the sheer amount of uninteresting, plodding half-riffs that dominate the album, as energy can never build up to anything worthwhile.  They don't even attempt to build towards anything, the album is really content to just sit and chug shiftlessly at a low-mid pace for the entire runtime and that's about the extent of the creativity you'll find on here.

I'll give the vocals credit for being fairly sweet and smooth, but it's unfortunate that she's given nothing good to sing over, and her vocal lines themselves are just as static and feckless as the rest of the band.  You'd think a band that's clearly built around melodic vocals would have at least a bit of sense to actually write some good melodies.  But no, here we are, with nothing ear catching or interesting happening anywhere.  Wine of Heaven is a creatively bankrupt knockoff of... something.  I dunno man, I never listen to this kind of faux-gothic symphonic metal that astoundingly lacks gothic appeal, worthwhile symphonics, and even rudimentary metal, but something this lame and uninspired just has to be based on something else that's actually good.  Within Temptation sounds like this, right?  Yeah even if it's not a perfect match, it's the same idea of utterly riffless fluff with occasional keyboards that don't create any sort of atmosphere or carry any gorgeous melodies or anything of the sort.  Call it unprofessional to not be familiar with the scene if you like, but I know weak music when I hear it.  It's all very sluggish and bloated, with simplistic two-note chugs comprising every riff and vocals just sort of languidly floating over the top with very little emotion to complement an otherwise pleasant timbre.  It's very amateurish.  Listen to "Hot as Blood", the intro sounds like the intro to basically any decent trad metal song with a solo guitar jamming a simple riff while the bass drum thumps underneath, preparing for when the track unleashes and goes somewhere.  But it doesn't!  This obvious intro is actually the basis of the entire song.  It's just stuck in fucking intro riff mode for five minutes and ends before the band can figure out what the fuck to do with itself.  Even lamer is that this is, by a fairly noticeable margin, the fastest song on the album.  This is the most energy they can muster, a five minute long intro riff.

For an alleged "power metal" band, there's no power here.  It's a directionless mess of non-riffs that accomplish nothing and I recommend this to nobody.  If nothing else, Mastercastle has improved my opinion of Delain a thousandfold, since I now have a point of reference as to what this music sounds like when shit actually happens.


RATING - 18%

Eternium - Repelling a Solar Giant

ZAMORAAAAAAAAAAK

Let's talk about maximalist, over the top, ridiculous bullshit for a minute here.  In the realm of over the top metal, I tend to prefer the catchier stuff, hence my love of Rhapsody (stop being idiots, you know they rule).  But with that in mind, there is another subsect that can work equally well, despite my miniscule inclination to seek it out or listen to it, and that is the long, drawn out narrative.  The terrible, terrible city responsible for both Nelly and the worst bunch of goons currently in hockey has produced such a band that has in turn produced such an album, Eternium's Aura Vesuvianite: Repelling a Solar Giant

Basically what we have here is a hearty mix of Emperor, Sacramentum, and Septic Flesh.  Or more succinctly, symphonic black/death metal with a high arching concept of love, balance, betrayal, and hatred and insanity permeating sonic soundscapes that traverse astral planes and other obscenely pretentious adjectives.  Really, I can't go into too much detail because that would be doing a disservice to the storytelling present on the record, but I wholeheartedly recommend you read along with the lyrics as you listen to this, as it works along the same lines as something like Traveller where simple knowledge of the story behind the music adds and entirely new dimension to everything.  Knowing precisely what the creator had in mind here actually does make everything just a bit more enjoyable, as it at least gives some sort of background to the ridiculous Tengu wails.

Yeah, let me address the things I don't like first, because really there are only two.  One of which is half of Markov Soroka's vocals, the other thing being parts of Chad Griffin's keys, namely the awfully cheap violin patch.  Oh lord these strings sound cheap as shit.  I realize we're not talking about a Fleshgod Apocalypse style budget here, but everything else manages to sound good enough for what it is, so it's really distracting when this straight-out-of-Runescape MIDI sound just comes tearing through what is clearly meant to be a very emotional passage.  It's not enough to ruin anything, but it's enough to be distracting.  And then the vocals... well, about 80% of them are very, very good.  He wanders around from a deep Johan Hegg or Niilo Sevanen type roar to a more traditional Swedish black/death rasp, and he does both of them extraordinarily well.  The problem lies in what I've dubbed the "Tengu screams", because everything I do can somehow be tied back to videogames.  For those who weren't just going through puberty in the early 2000s, Tengu is the final boss from the bouncing game, Dead or Alive 2.  Now, I haven't played this game in ages, and I don't remember at all what Tengu sounded like, but I know that when I hear the completely crazed and whacked out ramblings and cacklings that signify certain characters in the story of Aura Malachite losing their sanity, all I can imagine is that Soroka looks like this fucking guy:

WARGLBHARLARHARHARLAHAHAHAHAAAA!~

But other than that and one or two really nitpicky things (the opening lines of "Aura Titian" sounding weirdly too dissonant and the tapping section of "Aura Rubicon" ending extremely awkwardly and abruptly), there's nothing really to complain about here.  Despite the big sweeping atmosphere and the epic backdrop of the music, it does well in keeping itself grounded with more traditional elements, and never strays too horribly far into symphonic wankery, instead basing the songs around ripping tremolos and atmospheric chord progressions.  Fans of hard hitting riffs aren't going to get their fill here, but that's clearly not the intent of Eternium so I'm not at all fussed about it.  Aura Hambergite is all about atmosphere, and yet it can never really be considered "atmospheric" black metal, ya know?  It's very well done, very guitar heavy, and very ripping and intense, but there's always a soaring sense of majesty carrying it over in the background.  Tracks like "Aura Titian" and "Aura Infernum" are very opaque in their beauty.  I hate to get all Opeth-y here, but yeah, this is a gorgeous album.  Beyond all the twisted morbidity, there's a very prevalent sense of splendor, and the backing keys are always filling the role quite nicely.  And if you exclude the damn Tengu jabbering, there isn't a dead spot anywhere on the album.

All in all, Aura Tourmaline is a very dense album, with a lot of things happening within every given passage.  This works to its advantage though, as the songwriting is definitely up to par with the adventurousness of the compositions.  It shouldn't be a surprise that there are no pop structured songs here, all of them being these sprawling journeys that branch out in all directions at once.  The entire album is surrounded by an aura (fuck you) of emotion, and it's a surprisingly very feelsy album.  The aggression is only at the forefront about 60% of the time (especially on "Aura Amethyst", easily my favorite track to be found), while the rest of the time the center stage is taken by the always present atmosphere.  Amongst all the tremolo and blasting, there are also these dissonant, droning passages that just ooze the essence of sadness and loss.  The feeling itself is easily discernible anyway, but the feeling is amplified when the lyrics are read along/understood as well.  The band has really already mastered the art of getting emotions across without blatantly yelling about them, instead channeling them through the music itself.

Despite the rough edges in spots, Aura Feldspar is a flawed gem (fuck you again) that is most definitely worth listening to.  I feel like if enough time is taken with the sophomore album, and more attention is given to the little quibbles I've nagged on, it could really launch the band into the upper echelon of extreme symphonic metal that Fleshgod Apocalypse has been helping to make so popular recently.  When the vocals are good, they're great, and when they're off, they're just plain silly.  It's a very mature and well composed debut effort regardless, and if nothing else, you should check out "Aura Amethyst", because it's by far the most intense track, and "Aura Sentium" is by far the most emotional.  Those two show the two sides of the bands at their strongest, without either side being devoid of the other.  The album as a whole is... well, just well put together.  I'm not sure I see it cracking my year end list quite yet, but it's a hungry enough effort to at least be gunning for a low spot.


RATING - 84%

Obtained Enslavement - Witchcraft

The Taste Swap hits bullseye for a change

So a few months ago, I hit up some of my more talented fellow reviewers whose work I respected despite having very little taste in common with, and undertook a Taste Swap Challenge.  Well today is round three, wherein I swap with yet another Canadian, this time the cascadian "holy shit maaaaan this is so transcendental" genius in RapeTheDead.  True story, he was the first guy to track down my personal Facebook page and send me fanmail that way, so even if he was a shitty writer (which he isn't), I'd love him anyway.

Anywho, just like with the last one, I didn't quite get what I was expecting when I proposed the swap challenge.  I mean, he certainly provided me with black metal, no doubt, but I was expecting something along the lines of Gris or Agalloch, but instead what he gave me was more along the lines of Emperor.  And even better, it's apparently an extremely well regarded album within the black metal scene.  And even better than that, all the heaps of praise that get piled on top of the album are 100% deserved.

That's right, out of the fjordiest fjords of northern fjordland, we have Obtained Enslavement, and despite being much less of a black metal guy than certain other genres, I feel pretty confident in calling their second album, Witchcraft, one of the finest symphonic black metal albums in existence.  Obviously I'm a fan of symphonic metal in general anyway, I've been defending Rhapsody of Fire for years, but this is one of the very, very few albums to incorporate the classical influence so bloody masterfully.  At no point do the strings, keys, horns, or that goddamn awesome timpani feel tacked on as an afterthought, and at the same time, the same can be said about the traditional metal instrumentation.  It can be difficult to tell which aspect of the overall sound is leading the other at times, which is brilliant because it shouldn't really be one or the other anyway, and Obtained Enslavement not only realized that, but managed to execute it very well.

Take the metal portion of the record, for instance.  In a sense I suppose you could call it "typical", since the vast majority of the guitar work is comprised of tremolo patterns and the drums seem to blast along for a good amount of the running time, but the inherent melody in these riffs are just overwhelming.  I can't even point out specific examples because every single track manages to nail this flawlessly.  That's actually one of the most prevalent aspects about Witchcraft, the melody.  It's pretty much overwhelming in its complexity and saturation, but it never crosses into the territory of being sugary and harmless.  This album manages to beef up classical passages with aggressive morbidity whilst simultaneously giving raw and hateful black metal a sense of beauty and fullness.  The two halves of the pie complement each other in a way that has yet to be replicated in the realm of metal as a whole, and truly must be heard to be believed.  I mean, I like Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk just as much as the next guy, but this here is just in a class of its own.  Basically, if you take the elements that make up that mid era of Emperor and just make them... I dunno, better, you'd end up with something along the lines of Obtained Enslavement.  The songs are just bewilderingly well written, following twisting and linear progressions that keep the compositions interesting while never traversing the same path twice.  It's rare to find themes repeating themselves, as instead the album is treated like a journey as opposed to a collection of songs.  And I love how well it works, it takes you by the hand and leads you down a path of twisted horrors that manage to be gorgeous in their evil.

I feel pretty much unqualified to write on Witchcraft, because it feels like it deserves a much more pretentious and in-depth analysis than I'm able to provide, but like I've said plenty of times in the past, I know good music when I hear it, and goddammit Obtained Enslavement is some damn good music.  Every time I listen, I'm blown away all over again and the sheer depth and complexity provided by one would assume (if one were to judge a book by its cover, which we all do all the fucking time) to be a fairly typical black metal affair.  I feel like the album gets a little less adventurous as it goes on, with the first couple tracks being essentially classical pieces with black metal instruments and the later tracks being more black metal songs with symphonic influence, but it's really not even a flaw because it keeps the album from becoming tedious and one dimensional (not that that was possible with such a wide array of themes, ideas, and instrumentation in the first place).  I haven't even found a place to mention that the vocalist of this entire affair is fucking Pest, which is just yet another one of the dozens of marks in this album's favor (I'm not much of a Gorgoroth fan, but the albums I do like (Antichrist and Under the Sign of Hell) feature Pest, so quality just seemed to follow this man in the mid 90s).  I don't know what it is about him, but his vocals are just otherworldly to me, taking a wet, throaty rasp and just blasting it past realms of mortal capability. 

Obtained Enslavement pretty easily just watched themselves catapult into the upper echelon of black metal bands I'll listen to relatively frequently.  What they managed to do was make a black metal album melodic and complex enough and attract fans of other subgenres while keeping it as misanthropic and dark as the genre usually is, thus managing to not alienate established fans of the genre.  By virtue of that alone, this is one of the more perfect metal albums of all time from a technical standpoint.  Now, I'm not about to chuck this up next to hallowed personal favorites of mine like Melissa or The Crimson Idol or anything, but considering I have no negative things to say about an album that so brilliantly combines so many different aspects of music without ever coming across as disjointed or confusing, it's pretty hard to deny the significance of the imagination that Witchcraft captures.  From huge, sweeping majesties being grounded in morbid hatefulness in "From Times in Kingdoms..." to the raw evil being uplifted by gorgeous strings in "The Seven Witches", nothing misses the mark.  I'm astounded at how well crafted and executed this album manages to be, and it pretty solidly cements itself as the most successful entry into my infrequent Taste Swap Challenges.  RapeTheDead, thank you, you fucking owned this round.


Once again, this guy doesn't have a personal site (and only a small handful of reviews compared to the others I've done this with), but his talent is undeniable. True story, a while back I was toying with the idea of bringing in a second writer for Lair of the Bastard for the purpose of covering the genres I have a habit of neglecting, and RapeTheDead was the first and only candidate I had in mind. So yeah, read his stuff.


RATING - 97%

Rhapsody of Fire - Triumph or Agony

Rhapsody grows tired of being awesome

I feel like I've been pretty clear about this in the past, but I'm going to reiterate it really quickly: I love the shit out of Rhapsody.  They're pretty much the textbook example of what I love about power metal.  The songwriting is as busy as it is infectious and as theatrical as it is overindulgent.  It's a style that doesn't lend itself well to restraint, and that's why I can publicly love a stupid band like Dragonforce and not feel the slightest hint of shame.  This style is fun, and it's at its most fun when it's just throwing caution to the wind and letting loose all over the place, enthusiastically just throwing me on the back of Odahviing and sweeping me across magical lands and epic adventures.  That's what Rhapsody nailed so much with their original Emerald Sword Saga (the first four (five?) albums (Rain of a Thousand Flames is still an EP in my mind)).  The band simply did not give one single shit about subdued atmosphere or intelligent complexity, their sole goal was to tell a silly, cliched, over the top fantasy tale and cram as much epic sounding choirs and orchestrations they could into their journey.  Some people may not take well to the overindulgent ear candy style they aimed for, but I ate it up happily.

By the time their second story (The Dark Secret Saga) began, something had... changed.  Symphony of Enchanted Lands II was a much more subdued effort, much less focused on showy bombast and moreso focused on sweeping grandeur.  It was pretty I suppose, but "pretty" isn't the kind of feeling I want to envision whilst listening to Rhapsody.  I want to feel swept up above magical wars with entire worlds in the balance, not take a pleasant ride over a lush, green landscape.  The second chapter, Triumph or Agony, manages to fall in a similar pit, though for different reasons.

Rhapsody's entire tenure with Magic Circle Music can pretty much be summed up with the observation that one of their biggest criticisms early on was that there was always just too much going on in their music, and so they overcorrected and started writing droning songs where nothing at all would happen.   That was the biggest issue with Symphony of Enchanted Lands II; it was full of overlong filler songs with a couple great ones scattered around, whereas Triumph or Agony here gives us the worst of both worlds by giving us even more filler in the form of shorter but even more boring songs and filling almost the entire album with dull ballads.  Here's all you really need to know from this album, "Triumph or Agony", "Heart of the Darklands", "Son of Pain", parts of "Silent Dream", and parts of the trademark epic closing track, "The Mystic Prophecy of the Demon Knight".  That's three full songs and a handful of sections from two others, only one of any of those songs being one of the low tempo ballads/dullards.  This album is completely plagued with the sort, and many of Rhapsody's trademarks are missing.  There's no folksy bouncy track like "The March of the Swordmaster", "The Village of Dwarves" or "Danza di Fuoco e Ghiaccio", nor are there any out-and-out burners like "Holy Thunderforce", "Agony is My Name" or "Rain of a Thousand Flames". 

"The Mystic Prophecy of the Demon Knight" may not hold a candle to previous and future album closers like "Symphony of Enchanted Lands", "Gargoyles, Angels of Darkness", or the near perfect "Heroes of the Waterfalls' Kingdom", but it's pretty serviceable for what it aims for and does a good job of bringing the album full circle by repeating the motifs of the overture.  It has a nice, typical Rhapsody style chorus, full of over the top projection and fluff, it's exactly the kind of thing fans want to hear.  So even though it isn't quite as good from a songwriting standpoint as we know the band can be, it's still pretty refreshing after seven or eight tracks that sound like an entirely different, and entirely less inspired band.  The first proper song, the title track, is also extremely good.  It's actually somewhat frustrating because it starts the album off on such a high note and lulls you into a false sense of security, feigning a fast, energetic journey to contrast the previous album's more laid back sightseeing tour.  The pre-chorus in particular is among the catchiest vocal lines that Lione has ever sang.

TWO HUNDRED NOoOoOR OF UNHOLY STONE

It's unfortunate that the darker, more intense yet overly bombastic sound of the first track fades away so quickly.  The next track is another fun, shreddy track, but after that the album just drops anchor and shits out three ballads in a row.  I mean, I'm not going to pretend that ballads automatically suck (I actually like "Son of Pain" pretty well), but they have never been the band's strength, and the fact that they always manage to shoehorn in at least one per album has always irritated me and has always held the band back from releasing any full, start to finish genre-defining classics.  Rhapsody is an energetic band and is at their best when gripping their hilts with vigor and determination, not languidly stroking their flaccid shafts while trying so desperately to emote anything other than enthusiastic spunk.   Trudging through nearly 45 minutes of a Rhapsody album nearly entirely devoid of Turilli and Starpoli's absurd guitar/keyboard soloing is like... man I sat here for like fifteen minutes with that sentence half finished because that is so unheard of.  Things like the completely obnoxious soloing and oversaturation of choirs and overblown orchestration is exactly what made the band what they were, and the dearth of all of these qualities leaves us with a very hollow, uninspired album.  The entire thing just runs by as if on autopilot, and save for the handful of exciting sections, it's just completely unstimulating.

I don't even know who Triumph or Agony is supposed to appeal to, honestly.  Old fans of the Emerald Sword Saga are going to find the utter lack of energy to be wanting, and the non-fans who disliked how busy and over the top the band previously was will likely find the exact same problem.  Like I said, the album just feels like a huge overcorrection in response to a criticism that called for something antithetical to the band's modus operandi in the first place.  They were a group of nerds and manchildren who didn't seem to realize how silly they were, but played everything so straight that it was endearing, and the goofy music was so enjoyable that there was no reason to hold it against them.  It seems that this album and its predecessor show a band who became self aware and then focused too much on trying to be more mature and dark, and it just ends up sounding like dull, plodding crap.  Thankfully, the following albums would rectify these issues (I'm going to just go ahead and blame Joey DeMaio's shitty label/attitude), but as it stands, the whole time spent with Magic Circle stands as the dead-ball era of Rhapsody's career, and Triumph or Agony illustrates the phenomenon brilliantly.  In the realm of over-the-top symphonic power metal, Rhapsody is one of the perennial heavyweight champions, and this is an album with only trace amounts of over-the-top, power, or even metal.  You do the math.


RATING - 27%

5150 - Symphonic Touhou VI

(´･ω･`) 

I'm not sure when it happened, but somewhere down the line over the past few months or so, I started treading down that dreaded path of the weeaboo.  You know the type, the boy who sits around, whacking off to Rozen Maiden and the girl cosplaying as Mion from Higurashi no Naku Koro ni; the two of them cornholing each other in a storage shed.  Yeah, lately, I've been skipping happily down that unbearably fruity trail for reasons even I don't understand.  There's just some bizarre allure to Japanese culture to me.  I love the language, I love how it sounds when spoken and looks when written, I love the old history and how such a large and populous nation managed to stay isolated from the entire world for so long.  I love the weird little cultural quirks in media that seem to exist nowhere else (like anime and other obvious shit).  I wish I could explain, but all this means is that I've basically just been listening to more Gargoyle than usual and lying to myself as I try to shoehorn myself into a subculture I have nothing to do with.  But regardless, I feel like a human being walking into the Great Youkai Forest for the first time, which brings me to the subject today, the cult classic bullet hell shooter, Touhou Project.

I'll be honest, I know fuck all about Touhou, I just know that there are a gargantuan contingent of bands/guitarists who take arrangements from the game and either cover or rearrange them.  This basically means that there are throngs of completely sugary, cutesy, and over-the-top power metal bands with obnoxiously epic songs and guitar parts overflowing out of Japan.  How is that not the greatest thing?  My lord, it's like there's been this incredibly massive subniche just waiting underneath my feet for eons, brimming with huge, bubbly flower metal.  I mean, Timeless Miracle's themes are really dark, but the music is as light and fluffy as it comes, and I've always been chasing that proverbial dragon, trying to find something equally light, fun, and memorable.

I found it in 5150.

This is pretty much my first Touhou/Doujin artist (I'd heard Iron Attack! before, but it didn't do much for me (I definitely need to revisit this, though)), and his four zillionth album, Symphonic Touhou VI, is pretty goddamn light, fun, and memorable.  Oh boy would you look at that?  That's exactly what I was asking for ever since falling in love with Timeless Miracle all those years ago!  Apparently, of Ryu-5150's dozen and a half full length albums, only some of them are Touhou arrangements, while the rest are original work.  Judging by the title of this, it's a pretty safe assumption that this is a Touhou album, and by Jove it's really goddamn good.  Apparently there are fourteen official games in the series, and since I'm new to this, there's no goddamn chance I'm about to just start plowing through all of them to figure out where all of these songs came from, and if Iron Attack! taught me anything, it's that I wouldn't be able to tell anyway since most Touhou artists rarely full-on cover any given song, usually just taking main melodies or lead lines and formulating entirely new pieces around them, rearranging the given parts to create something completely unique.  So, Touhou fans, I'm assuming this is the same thing here.

But even if it isn't, Symphonic Touhou VI is a quite enthralling romp through light, happy power metal of the catchiest kind.  For real, if you can get the choruses to "Like a Universe" or "Providence" out of your head in less than two weeks after initially hearing it, you are a fucking android.  Everything here is just so obnoxiously infectious, it's almost infuriating.  The vocals are beyond sugary and syrupy, taking the Tommy Johanssen approach of sanding all of the grit out of your voice and leaving with the most crystal clear, smooth sounding singing voice imaginable.  It sounds like it should be lacking in power, but he manages to put a surprising amount of force behind something so innocent and cute sounding.  It's like the vocal equivalent of a fire hose, if that makes any sense.

The main guy here (who goes by the oh so creative name of Ryu-5150) handles every instrument, not one other person is involved in the recording process here, and it shows he's a pretty great songwriter, as standard as this stuff is.  It's pretty straightforward light power metal with huge choruses and an unhealthy slathering of keys and synths, but it's all so ear catching and poppy that it's hard to hold any vitriol against it for any perceived unoriginality.  The lyrics are, as far as I can tell, in hilariously accented Engrish (another reason I will always have a soft spot for cleanly sung foreign metal) that are about basically nothing.  Something about how the sun is down in Wichita so we must have slept the wrong way.  I HAVE NO IDEA, I DON'T CARE.  It's so bubbly and infectious, how can you possibly turn away from something like this?  Even Tard can't keep up her facade around something this happy.

And you know the strangest part?  Even that's not entirely true, because as happy and jovial and upbeat as this album is, there are still two huge exceptions to the rule.  Those exceptions are the tracks "Moment of Death" and "Sacrifice".  I swear on my mother's grave I'm not making this next part up, but those two songs are just straight up black metal.  Out of fucking nowhere come these super fast paced meloblack songs with some light keys in the background.  It's like somebody making a mixtape of Stratovarius songs and then just chucking in two Emperor songs for shiggles.  The best part is that they're just as good as the flower metal songs.  They're not as catchy, obviously, but they're well written and memorable, and no part of the performances comes off as phony.  Normally I'd lambast something like this for breaking the flow, but it's just so unexpected and (most importantly) well done that I don't even care.  I can't imagine this appealing to everybody, but hell, it appeals to me.  Are all Touhou albums like this?  I hope not, I want this to be special.

And you know what?  Symphonic Touhou VI is fucking special.  I don't give a shit that it's part of a scene that essentially just covers songs in a roundabout way, I don't care that this is the sixth album in this particular artist's series, I don't care at all.  I love this and I will cherish it forever.  This is the exact style of light, fluffy flower metal that the world can never have enough of.  Seriously, this isn't for everybody.  If you're the kind of person who thinks Rhapsody of Fire has no balls and is all just fruity keyboards and sissy vocals, A) you obviously haven't listened to any fucking Rhapsody songs and B) there's nothing you will enjoy about 5150.  Everything is so goddamn fun and cute and stupid and harmless and gah it's so damn fun.  Put on a skirt and just get lost in the fruitiness already, seriously.  If "Providence" were the national anthem, there'd be no war.  The only reason this doesn't get a perfect score is because fuck you that's why.


RATING - 94%

Christopher Lee - Charlemagne: The Omens of Death

Let's not yank each others' chains here

I'M SORRY, IT'S JUST NOT VERY GOOD

Really, I respect the absolute shit out of Christopher Lee, the guy is an incredible actor and has done more in his lifetime than I will ever do in my next six lifetimes, but... man he just can not do this.  So many people are just ejaculating with glee over the fact that Saruman is 91 years old and releasing metal albums, but I think they're just letting some of the extraordinarily glaring flaws get swept under the rug.  It's the same phenomenon we saw with The Devil You Know, where people fell absurdly in love with it simply because Dio, Iommi, and Butler were reunited and pushing like, six hundred years old apiece, and ignored the fact that only four of the ten songs are really engaging in any way (heresy, I know, but it's just really boring). 

There are three huge problems with the second in the Charlemagne saga, The Omens of Death, and thankfully one of them isn't the production.  By the Sword and the Cross suffered from one of the hands down most comically botched production jobs I'd ever heard.  Lee's vocals were approximately fifteen times louder than anything else, and the guitar sounded like somebody humming in another room, it was just a complete wreck.  Thankfully, people seemed to know what they were doing this time around, as it all sounds much more like a real album.  The guitars are still pretty muffled, which is kinda lame, but this clearly wasn't meant to be a guitar focused album, so I suppose it's not really a big deal.

But no, one of the three huge problems is just that the songwriting is unbearably bland.  Really, for a power metal fan, you've already heard this album back in 2002.  All the common trappings are present, from the choirs that are nice but kinda fall flat and aren't as epic as they should be, the most unimaginative riffs ever, a drummer who knows a grand total of two patterns (both just really standard beat keeping, Lars Ulrich level stuff), and attempts at catchy melodies and big soaring choruses.  Almost every song feels about three minutes longer than it actually is, and it's just because it's all so goddamn boring. I wish I could go into more detail but it's not really possible.  It's extraordinarily standard power metal with less bombast than one would hope for from a project with this much ambition.  Stale riffs and stale compositions, nothing to see here.  If there's any shining bright spot with the music, it's that it oftentimes reminds me of the music from Dynasty Warriors 4 (check out the end of "The Ultimate Sacrifice", tell me that isn't straight away worthy of being the theme over the credits).

Another gaping fissure in the album is actually the main draw itself.  I'm sorry, Christopher Lee's vocals are fucking horrible.  He just narrates, which is all well and good normally, he has a great narration voice, but he tries singing frequently, and he's just bad at it.  He's an old man, and he has an old man voice, and after 91 years of kicking ass, he just doesn't have the physical ability to be singing these big, booming baritone parts that he's aiming for.  Remember back in my Kelly McKee review how I lambasted his vocals for sounding like he was just changing his tone while talking?  Yeah, sad to say this about one of the most influential and well respected (and just downright most talented) actors of the past century, but Christopher Lee here does the exact same thing.  Apparently he used to sing back in the day, I haven't heard that stuff, but right here, right now, he's incapable of doing what he's trying to do.  It's admirable, but it still sucks.  The best parts vocally are without a doubt the choirs, since they don't involve Lee's voice, and they're one of the only times we get to hear exuberant voices instead of tired old man storytelling or lazy guest vocals.  Yeah, even the guest vocals, by technically accomplished opera singers, are just boring as hell.  All of the vocals sound sedated, and it's a chore to listen to.

The last problem though, is by far my favorite, and I didn't even realize it until I was halfway done with this review.  Whilst talking to a friend about it, I noted that the vocals seemed to not match at all, like they were off-tempo, and there were even parts where it sounded digitally sped up (like the middle of "Charles the Great").  His response to this observation is still making my head spin, several days later.  "Well that's because there are basically no new vocals on this album, they're all the same parts from the first Charlemagne album".

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!

I'm sorry, I don't give a single shit if you're Dracula or Saruman or an ex-WWII spy or a real life knight or a nonagenarian, this is fucking lazy and inexcusable.  The Omens of Death is, for all intents and purposes, a heavy metal remix of his first album, By the Sword and the Cross.  I've seen almost no mention of this around the internet, in promotional material or interviews, and even Lee himself states: "The first Charlemagne album is metal, of course, but what I sang was more symphonic".  Ironic then that the music has been made heavier but his vocals are literally unchanged.  It's hard to forget "I SHED THE BLOOD OF THE SAXON MAN" when it's repeated ten squillion times across two separate albums.  I'm on to you, you dastardly old codger.  This is fucking sheisty and dishonest, and I, for one, don't tolerate underhanded laziness, even from one of the most accomplished men out there.  The songs all have new titles and are arranged differently, and there's no mention from Lee that the first three quarters of the album provide nothing new from him, so yeah, I'm calling bullshit on it.  I feel like most people haven't even noticed since, let's be honest, nobody listened to that first album.  I know I certainly only heard a few samples and decided to stay away, what about the rest of you?  Yeah, that's what I thought.  The last handful of songs are new apparently, but they suffer from all the same problems as the first batch; boring instrumentals, sedated vocals from an old man with a whopping three semitone range, and a general feeling of disconnect between Lee and the rest of the band.

This is a trainwreck, through and through.  There's almost nothing I like about it, from the dull arrangements to the wimpy riffs to the uninspired melodies to Lee himself, almost every component falls flat.  I like what Lee was trying to do, and it's very inspiring to see such a respected actor with a passion for something as juvenile as power metal when he's old enough to have one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, but let's face it, a lazy vanity project isn't going to give metal any more legitimacy as a style of music nor an artform.  The Omens of Death is bad enough as a standalone, but the added insult of Lee not even doing so much as recording new vocals or writing new lyrics for a vast majority of the album is just absolutely ludicrous.  Yeah, after all he's done, he's earned the right to relax a little bit, but I retain my right to call him out on it when it results in a shitty final product.  At the very, very least, Hedras Ramos does a great job with what he's given, and his solos are generally very cool, but they aren't enough to save the album.  In fact, Ramos couldn't save a game of Final Fantasy if the entire game took place within a save point and the only command in battle was "save" and the game was called Final Fantasy: Save Point.


RATING - 15%

Wintersun - Wintersun

Yeah it's ass, but he wiped it so well!

In honor of the recent announcement that Jari Maenpaa hates all of his fans and would like nothing more than to poo on the face of each and every one of you, I figure it's high time I actually get around to giving a similar treatment to his much lauded first labor of love.  Just as Ensiferum was reaching peak popularity, a scheduling conflict arose between the band and Jari's pet solo project.  He had to make a huge decision, and he decided to leave the band that was taking the collective metal fandom by storm and helping to give folk metal it's first huge boost in order to honor the studio time he had booked for Wintersun.  I personally think this was a brilliant choice since I love Ensiferum and would love to hear them release an album more frequently than once every fucking decade.

But despite the fact that the absurd waiting period is nothing new for Jari's music (the first handful of songs written for this album came about in the mid nineties), this self titled debut is not the place to complain about such things.  This is strangely ironic though, since the album feels like it takes four times longer to finish than it actually does.  Yeah, this thing draaaags so badly that it may as well come bundled with an anchor.  It's a little under and hour long, but part of me is convinced that that is only the case because it sucks so badly that it actually manages to warp the space-time continuum.  I'd rather listen to Food for the Gods or Akhet Mery Ra, and those are both literally four hours long.  I'm saying that without ever hearing those two albums, by the way, because they'd  have to put a lot of effort into failing intentionally to be less interesting and more full of themselves than Wintersun here.

One of the biggest flaws with the album (apart from the songs themselves just not being very good) is the pacing.  The eight tracks are arranged from shortest to longest, which I suspect was an attempt to make each new venture sound more epic than the last, leading to a giant, fulfilling climax with the ten minute closer, "Sadness and Hate".  Really though, it just hammers home that each new song is going to be longer than the previous one, and it just ends up sounding stretched and forced.  This means that even high tempo, blast beat filled numbers with tons of melody like "Starchild" just fade into the white noise that is the last 48 minutes of this album.  It certainly doesn't help that Jari has continued with the whole irritating dichotomy that early Ensiferum suffered from here, which is that the slower, more grandiose songs are boring as fuck and the fast, melodic singalongs are hooky and infectious.  So it isn't surprising that the only two tracks that are worth a damn are the first two ("Beyond the Dark Sun" and "Winter Madness"), which are unironically the fastest, shortest, and most to-the-point songs on the album.  The former is an absolute riff monster with a pummeling pace and energy, while the latter retains those qualities while injecting a lethal dose of melody, a great, singalong style chorus, and what is honestly one of my all time favorite guitar solos.  This is the kind of thing Jari excels at, high speed power metal numbers with great hooks and a knack for condensing a lot of epic sensibilities into a short window.

The problem is that when he gets a bigger window, he continues to throw fucking everything he can find into the music and it ends up as a collection of dozens of unrelated ideas that don't at all mesh into a coherent song.  I know I'm a hungry hungry hypocrite and all that, but this is all style and no substance.  The vast majority of the last six tracks are an incoherent mess of melody and symphonics and super fast melodeath riffs and double bass and hilariously amateur local theatre style clean vocals and ballads and cookies and gummy bears and AAAAAAH.  As a guy who is a giant fan of early Children of Bodom, this completely unrestrained and over the top blend of melodeath and power metal should theoretically appeal to me, but it's done in such a mind-bogglingly uninteresting way that I almost think this should be studied.  It's a fascinating failure in that it manages to take a bunch of good things, use them far past their logical intended limit, continue to use them even when they don't work, and just mercilessly flog them until you forget why and how any of these elements were good in the first place.  Just like the 2012-13 Lakers!  ZING!

Tracks like "Sleeping Stars" and "Death and the Healing" just pull the goddamn dragchute on the album's pace.  Slow songs aren't an issue, but when these two are both so dull and numbing that they could be considered a reasonable alternative to Novocaine and they both immediately follow an uptempo scorcher, it just makes you wonder why they were placed where they were in the first place.  Oh wait, it's because that's how long the songs are and that was the only thing taken into consideration when arranging this.  Which is a pretty huge issue because "Battle Against Time", "Starchild", and "Beautiful Death" all have a lot of potential as songs.  They're either extraordinarily epic and melodic, or incredibly fast and melodic, but the trait they all share is that they're all about three minutes too long.  Sections are repeated far too often and uninteresting melodic passages with about fifty different things happening show up and just wreck the atmosphere.  "Battle Against Time" is like a four minute long continuous climax, and it builds up a grand journey that sounds like it would be goddamn awesome to experience, it's just unfortunate that there are three redundant minutes that add nothing at all to the song and instead just make it feel entirely too long for it's own good.  This is frustrating because it just further showcases how flukey of a songwriter Jari truly is.  Sometimes he nails it, other times he has good ideas but utterly fails to implement them effectively, but most of the time he just gets far more ambitious than he needs to be and completely misses his mark. 

And then there are the more ballady songs, and those are easily the worst offenders of this whole ordeal.  It's bad enough that there are seventy six tracks of symphonics and clean vocals being layered on top of one another, but they don't succeed at what they aim for at all.  They have no atmosphere, they just plod along with a ton of crap going on in the foreground and it just feels like all the synths and strings are trying to distract me from how bare bones the songs really are.  It's like Cruella de Vil, with a gaint fluffy exterior that tries to cover up a frail, fragile base with glamorous excess.  They're utterly inconsequential and just bring the album to a screeching halt whenever they appear.  Even when they bust into two minute long sweeping solos, you can just imagine Jari (well... maybe not Jari, he's too in love with himself... so just imagine literally any other guitar player) sitting there with a completely uninterested look on his/her face as they shred these stale patterns over a completely lifeless track.  I can find precisely zero "majesty" or "beauty" in these half-hearted logs of nothingness.

Despite all the issues of the songs mostly being too long or too overblown to contain anything actually interesting, I can't help but feel like the completely bonkers track ordering is one of the biggest issues with the album.  So, in the interest of science, I reordered it.  I didn't edit down any of the songs like I'd suggested, but I may in the future.  Try ordering the album like this:

"Battle Against Time"
"Winter Madness"
"Death and the Healing"
"Beyond the Dark Sun"
"Sadness and Hate"
"Sleeping Stars"
"Starchild"
"Beautiful Death"

By starting the album off with "Battle Against Time", you set the stage for a big epic, with the song's giant climaxes and clean chorus, it gives a bit of a taste of everything the album has to offer.  Then we get a barnburner with another great chorus and a blistering solo, followed by a ballad, then the fastest, shortest song to lead into the longest track, which is far too full of itself but at least you aren't just praying for the album to end by the time it finally starts, followed the other ballad because it sucks but it at least keeps the flow going after the previous clunker, which actually sets the stage fairly well for the fast, long, abundantly melodic "Starchild", finally closing on the track with the most overtly epic atmosphere, ending the album on a strong, hard-hitting note of "I'M NOT READY TO DIIIIEEEEEE".

This is not perfect, as there's really no way to fix songs as boring as "Sleeping Stars", but at least it doesn't make every song feel like it's just taking ages to end, and it follows a more logical flow than how it's currently set up.  If it were arranged like this, I'd still have all of the same issues with the album itself, but I could probably score it 15-20 points higher considering it at least wouldn't be as much of a chore to sit through.

The bottom line is that there are some good ideas here, but they're rarely implemented in such a way that makes them fit with all the rest of the ideas (good and bad) that are flying around the album.  A huge portion can be described as the musical equivalent of Jari not understanding why a square peg doesn't fit in a round hole, and so he just starts bashing it with a mallet until the peg and hole are both damaged to the point of the peg being forced in.  When Jari drops all the completely insane tendencies to just throw anything and everything at the listener and focuses his energy on strong melody or infectious hooks or straightforward metal, he can really nail it.  "Beyond the Dark Sun" and "Winter Madness" are both fantastic songs, and there are some good ideas in a few other tracks that are just unfortunately arranged and put together like ass, while a couple others are completely unsalvageable trainwrecks.  Add to that a terrible idea of flow and structure and then make it all spew forth from one of the most intensely unlikeable cocks in metal and you end up with a pretty shitty album overall.  Jari Maenpaa folded with a focus and intensity normally seen only in successes.  I'm not gonna call the fans a bunch of turds who are entertained by jingling keys and believe that something is majestic and beautiful simply because it has keys and they're told as such, but OH LOOK GO GET THE BALL!  *throws tennis ball*


RATING - 34%


PS - I hate how "Jari Maenpaa" is on the album art.  God forbid somebody mistake this as a band effort instead of all coming from his one glorious, genius imagination.  I hope he swallows a bumble bee.

Wintersun - Time I

Album of Time and Ego

Well this is it, kids.  The big one, the one you've all been waiting with bated breath for nearly a decade for.  Jari Maenpaa's alleged masterpiece, the one and mighty Time.  After leaving Ensiferum at the height of their popularity to focus full time on his baby, Wintersun, Jari has spent presumably all of his free time obsessively crafting this masterwork, this ode to the gods of music, this sonic journey through time and stars and snow.  Tours were canceled, tentative release dates kept on being pushed back or passing by with nary a fart noise coming from Jari's general direction.  This was poised to be his Use Your Illusion.  He has a monumentally successful debut and then spends the next couple years being a reclusive perfectionist while meticulously nitpicking and perfecting his complex vision.  I mean really, he describes the music as "Extreme Majestic Technical Epic Melodic Metal", which sounds like some ridiculous shit I would make up in order to make fun of it.  Really, look at that profoundly superfluous descriptor and try to imagine what the fuck Wintersun sounds like.  Clearly this is the work of a mad genius, the musical equivalent of Nikola Tesla for the new millennium.

Now Time is finally, for realsies out and finished, and to the shock of precisely nobody, it's a goddamn insult.

Eight years.  Think about that, think about everything that's happened in those eight years.  The Chicago Blackhawks went from perennial whipping boys to Stanley Cup champions, Saddam, Gaddafi, and bin Laden were all killed, a black man became president of the United States, MutantClannfear lived more than half of his life, and Fall Out Boy's entire career happened.  In all of this time, Jari assured us he was slaving away, doing his absolute damnedest to make sure he was getting his creation just perfect for all of us.  This dude was acting like goddamn Howard Hughes, except he managed to skip straight to the piss-drinking insanity stage.  There are apparently something preposterous like 100+ tracks on each song, the hypothetical tape would be fucking transparent if this weren't all digital.  The problem is that he thinks he can be Queen here, and just capture this huge journey and set it to music that's as complex as it is accessible, that's as bombastic as it is grounded.  If Jari Maenpaa is Queen, then I'm Roger Ebert.

I could make stupid metaphors and similes until the goddamned sun implodes if left unchecked (I even passed on my overdone picnic analogy!  Go me!), so I'm going to attempt to rein myself in here and explain why Time I is so offensive.  And really, a huge component is the ratio of sheer amount of time it took to complete to the actual amount of content we got as a result.  I can't get over the fact that after eight years of waiting, the band is actually going to play the Darelle Revis card and hold out on us after proving themselves precisely once.  Wintersun's self titled debut is for some utterly perplexing reason heralded as a beacon of metal songwriting despite containing precisely two good songs followed by what feels like ten hours of Jari jerking off to pictures of himself.  Based on that, fans have waiting patiently for enough time for a Great Dane to live its entire life for the follow up, and when that day finally, finally came, we were only given half of the final product.  What kind of bullshit turd dicking move is that?  After all this goddamn time, you expect me to lap up five measly tracks, only breaking the forty minute mark because the last song has three minutes of an unrelated instrumental transition track tacked on to the back of it and then promise me that the second half will be out soon?  Bitch your word is worth about as much as the Hungarian pengo, I'll have kids in grade school by the time the second half of this album sees the light of day if your track record is anything to go by.  Because hey kids, here's some random trivia you've all seemed to have forgotten, the first handful of songs written for the first Wintersun album were written... *drum roll* eight fucking years before the album was released.  This obnoxious waiting period is nothing new for the band, Jari takes his sweet time when writing music.  But hey, let's pretend for the sake of keeping this review on track, that Time II comes out within a month, does it still justify the piddly bullshit we have here for Time I?

Of course not, I'd be cursing a whole shitbucket less if that were the case.  The problem with this is that the preposterous waiting period doesn't show at all.  At no point is there anything complex enough, or well thought out enough, or executed strongly enough for me to believe that two high school careers were spent honing it to perfection.  Now don't get me wrong, this isn't a sloppy mess that sounds thrown together in the eleventh hour, clearly every moment was meticulously planned and orchestrated from the beginning, but it's all so mind-numbingly average that it becomes something worse entirely.  I feel like the problem here is that Jari simply thinks he's much more clever than he actually is, so he spends an eternity putting together this masterpiece that turns out to be something Rhapsody could have sneezed out in between their cruddy albums in the mid 00s. Did anybody truly expect this to be life affirmingly great?  Of course not, in fact I actually expected the music itself to be much worse than it actually is.  I won't deny for one second that the music is well performed and actually showcases some very diverse dynamics, which is a complete rarity for anything within the confines of metal nowadays.

The first two tracks rank somewhere between "very good" and "surprisingly great", and are paced masterfully.  This is a massive improvement from the self titled, which was paced like somebody sneezing and then watching their phlegm drip down a wall.  The songs there were arranged from shortest to longest, which I suspect was an effort to make the album feel more and more epic with each new piece, but instead made it feel longer and longer each time and really hammered home just how glacial and dull the album truly was.  Instead of blowing his wad early and then spending the next 45 minutes silently sobbing into his pillow, Jari instead actually builds up anticipation and releases it in a scarily brilliant fashion.  "When Time Fades Away" ranks as one of my favorite intro tracks of the past decade or so, to be entirely honest with you.  It's merely an intro and it's quite lengthy as far as instrumental intros go, but the fact that it slowly builds up energy across a very palatable melody just works in such a strikingly beautiful way.  There's also a personal bias because ever since playing the old Playstation game, Tenchu, I've had an almost fetishistic affinity for traditional Japanese music.  I fucking love the twang of the shamisen and the pleasant coo of the whistles, and so the prominent Eastern influence is a huge plus, and something that actually managed to assuage my seething fury at the relative brevity of the album itself upon first listen.  The first proper song, "Sons of Winter and Stars", actually starts so smoothly that you can barely hear the transition between the intro if you aren't paying close attention, as it starts off with roughly thirty seconds of even more traditional Japanese music.  It paints this vivid picture of a dimension spanning journey the listener is about to embark on, and bewilderingly enough it actually manages to deliver on this promise in the beginning.  I touched on the dynamics earlier, and while I was slightly facetious about their quality (I do find the two extremes to be akin to Raiders of the Lost Ark in that the quiet parts are too quiet and the loud parts are too loud, and such ends up being distracting), it is nice to hear such thought and care put into the lesser aspects of the music.  Despite the soul-melting length of the track (over thirteen and a half minutes) and an extended quiet passage in the middle, "Sons of Winter and Stars" manages to not get dull.  The fast and bombastic parts are full of pomp and vigor, and as I've stated oodles of times in the past, that is when Jari is at his best.  It builds to no less than two very satisfying and well executed climaxes that end up being very depressing in the grand scheme of things.  That release of "Embrace the STAAAAAAAHS" is skin tinglingly great.  This is what most people were expecting this album to sound like, and for the first quarter of the alleged full product, it actually does live up to the stupidly high expectations that I certainly did not have.

It's only afterwards that the album falls into the rut that I just fucking knew it would fall into.  "Land of Snow and Sorrow" (can you tell that he names his songs with Wintersun ad-libs?) pulls the dragchute and spends the entirety of its duration just trudging along like a lost (and not adorable) puppy.  Listen to that opening guitar line and tell me that he really needed eight shit spackling years to tweak that to perfection.  It's a lazy, plodding, dull and uninteresting riff that just drives the exciting energy that the previous track just spent a quarter of an hour building up straight into the mud.  The orchestrations that build around it are uninspired and predictable, and the pace never picks back up.  Over eight minutes are spent on this lifeless, meandering snoozefest that never once ever attempts an epic moment.  That pan-dimensional journey the album was alluding that we'd embark on?  Yeah, this is where Jari just puts the controls on autopilot and fucks off to go eat some potato chips.  Nothing happens, the riffs just plod on like a dozy elephant and the symphonics just kind of diddle around with their own thing, just being wispy off in the atmosphere.  Imagine a version of "Sleeping Stars" from the previous album that's almost twice as long (while feeling twice as long as that, added on) with even less going on within the song.  I can't get over how intensely boring the song is, this is why the album is so offensive to me.  This is what we'd been waiting for?  Where was the brilliance we saw in that opener?  You're only going to present us with half of your vision, and as an added slap in the face, this dull pit of tripe is part of that?  This didn't take you eight years to write, this probably didn't even take eight hours.  This is insulting, and any fans lapping this up like good little minions are simply lying to themselves if you can find anything approaching good songwriting within.  Go jump off the highest point of your house and land face first on something pointy.

The "album" rounds out with another interlude-full song combo, and this one holds nary a percentage of the vigorous ambition of the first set.  "Darkness and Frost" (Seriously?  What are some of the tracks on the second part of this bloated turd going to be called?  "Stars of Snow and Darkness"?  "Winter of Stars and Time"?  "Starless Winter Darkness"?) is yet another competent Japanese influenced instrumental, though wholly lacking in the vibrancy and splendor of "When Time Fades Away", and builds up into the drudgery that is the title track.  "Time" is yet another dull, spiteful exercise in how to show your patient fans naught but utter contempt.  I could just copy and past my entire diatribe on "Land of Snow and Sorrow" here and the description would be just as apt.  The main difference is that "Time" is based around a higher tempo and contains one of Jari's patented shredding solos, and even that ends up sounding lame and forced.  I wasn't expecting another "Winter Madness", because that would be asking for the moon on a stick, but something a little more inspired than a warmup exercise would be mightily welcomed.  The clean vocals come off as tired and obligatory, the strings are dull and inconsequential, the drummer is so pointless that he might as well not get any royalties from the album sales.  There is a psyche-out buildup that leads to a loud orchestral part that somehow ends up sounding much less exuberant than the brilliance shown on "Sons of Winter and Stars", which I will continue to hold as the stick by which this entire experience should be measured by.  The song is truly only roughy nine minutes long, but in order to breach the forty minute mark, what was clearly intended to be another standalone interlude was tacked on to the end in order to juuuuust push it over the mark.  It's this kind of underhanded trickery that further fuels my virulent hatred of what this album stands for, which is a monumental lack of inspiration being mislabeled as visionary and consequently spoon fed to loyal fans as the answer to their prayers.  And then fence sitters and vocal detractors like myself are also expected to hear an unheard of brilliance within Time and, if not promptly switch sides for the cheerleader, to at the very least understand what the die hard fans have been chomping at the bit about.

Frankly, NO.  This is overblown yet still undercooked.  There's a lot of presentation with no flair.  And apart from one example of Jari's flukey genius, the other two thirds of the album's content is watered down nonsense with no appeal.  If you like this droning, plodding nonsense with weak symphonics, then by all means you'll eat this like candy.  I wasn't expecting this to be as fast paced as I prefer Jari to be ("Beyond the Dark Sun" and "Winter Madness" are legitimately great songs from the previous album, and are unironically the fastest and most to-the-throat songs on the album), but I wasn't expecting it to mirror the new Ensiferum album.  Yeah I said it.  This is akin to freakin' Unsung Heroes.  Both albums revel in the dull half of the early dichotomy that exemplified Jari's songwriting style on the first two Ensiferum albums.  Time I spends a majority of the album on the slow side, and just like the slow half of the first Ensiferum album, it's fucking bloated and boring, and with the extramusical qualities being taken into account, it's an insult to those who've been waiting.  Keep in mind, I'm not even a fan of Wintersun for the most part, so imagine how pissed off I'd be if I was given this dull, glorified EP as a reward for eight fucking years of faithful patience in the face of seemingly dogged contempt towards me.

I compared this to Use Your Illusion earlier, based solely on the fact that the main songwriter became a screwy and reclusive perfectionist after one monstrously popular album, but the ratio of time taken to complete to utter disappointment ranks closer to Chinese Democracy.  If you, as a fan, don't mind having your face spat in as long as you finally get to hear some new Wintersun material, then fine, go running back to your abusive ex, crying about how you still love him and you know he's sorry.  For me?  Fuck that, this is offensive to me on both a musical and non-musical level.  The second half of this album better A) come out very, very soon and B) contain some of the most stellar material I've ever heard as an avid listener of epic metal, because what we've been given with Time I is fucking insulting.


RATING - 28%

Fleshgod Apocalypse - Agony

Fleshgod of Fire

Fleshgod Apocalypse is a strange breed.  They're insane tech death, no doubt, but they take the intensity factor and turn it up to 11 as opposed to widdly-widdlying the living hell out of listeners.  Yeah, their drummer knows basically one beat and then just make believes a drum solo whenever he isn't blasting, but riff wise they're basically peerless in their genre.  As if that wasn't enough to set them apart, they interspersed their mind bending insanity with classical passages on Oracles and introduced clean, operatic vocals on Mafia.  Now there is literally no metal band on the face of the earth that sounds exactly like them, and they've built a pretty considerable fanbase at this point.  After signing to Nuclear Blast Records, they were officially at the top of their game, poised to become one of the world's most popular and creative death metal bands, what else could they possibly do?  They could either take the Krisiun route and stick to what they know they're good at, or they could continue to introduce the classical elements in their music and continue to forge this new path.  I would have said the correct choice was the latter, but now that they've released Agony, I'm only half sure it was the proper choice.

You see, their image and aesthetics helped them stand out as much as their creative take on tech death, and since the first details released about an upcoming album are purely aesthetical, it's understandable that I prepare for the worst when the aesthetics take a nose dive.  The band's stage gimmick hasn't changed (described as "undead gentlemen" or "Akercocke got in a car wreck") but let's face it, the album art and new logo really, really suck.  Worse yet, was that upon the release of the cover, the band commented on its meaning by giving this very long winded description of what it symbolized when really it was an extremely verbose way of saying "Mankind has a dark side that they must learn to control".  No, really?  I thought the raggedy man bound in chains symbolized the Disney's dominance of children's animation in the 1990s.  Silly me.  Also, every track barring the intro and outro is titled "The [Word]", much like Dimmu Borgir's fantastically hated In Sorte Diaboli... not the best precedent to go off of.

So the band is pretentious and artwork has been dumbed down, doesn't necessarily mean the music is gonna suck, does it?  Of course not, but the music here finds itself balancing upon a slack wire several stories in the air between "awesome" and "terrible".  I'm really, honestly not sure if I like this album or not.  The metal portion of the music is largely unchanged.  The percussion is extraordinarily loud and furious, almost never slowing down for a more relaxed beat.  Even the slower songs, "The Egoism" and "The Forsaking", are slow by guitar only, as the drums continue to blast and double bass their way along.  The riffing style has also been left fairly intact, consisting of hyperfast tremolo chords or hyperfast chugging chords.  I don't think any note outside the aforementioned slower tracks are longer than an eighth note, and considering the speed at which the songs fly by, that's pretty impressive.  "The Oppression" and the album's lead single, "The Violation" are probably the fastest tracks on hand, and some of the most intense that Fleshgod has ever put to tape, which is saying a whole hell of a lot.  The intensity is overwhelming, but that's exactly what made Oracles such an enjoyable release.  And when it comes to solos and leads, this is actually a huge step up, as they're both prominent, melodic, and memorable every time one appears.  When one focuses on the traditional metallic instruments, this is every bit as incredible as the previous stuff.

But therein lies the problem with Agony, the actual metal is buried under layers upon layers upon layers of symphonic overtones.  The classical touches that would occasionally appear for a few brief moments in Mafia have been given center stage here.  There is literally about a ten second section in the middle of "The Betrayal" where there are no strings or horns blasting through the speakers, and after repeated listens that ten second section is still the only piece of pure metal I've managed to find on the record.  That isn't to say the symphonic stuff is BAD, per se, it's just such a strange mixture with the hyperspeed tech death insanity that lies beneath.  It doesn't help that the synths are by far the loudest thing in the mix.  It isn't even like it's going on in the background, it's right in your face like David Lee Roth's nuts.  I want to compare it to fellow Italians, Rhapsody of Fire, but with my favorite absurd flower metallers the keys are always carrying the melody or building and epic atmosphere.  If the keys aren't building atmosphere or accentuating the melodic themes, what exactly are they doing?  The correct answer is nothing.  That's right, the symphonics don't really ever do anything. They rarely carry a noticeable, repeating melody, and whenever they're playing solo they don't do anything to build atmosphere or introduce the song's main theme or anything. They always seem to just be there for the sake of it and that's really irritating. I'd like to think I'm a pretty creative person, but using the symphonics on their own and in conjunction with the death metal as a backdrop, I can't imagine a scene in my head. It doesn't paint a picture of inner struggle like the band seems to imply it should convey, the symphonics make it sound neither epic nor foreboding, and the blasty blasty weedly woo is just as in your face and intense as it was previously, so it just seems like there's an annoying, unrelated orchestra playing completely different themes and ideas next door to the recording studio.  There's no cohesion, it's rare that the riffs and synths relate to one another in any way, so there's always this disjointed something-or-other happening in the foreground.

Fleshgod introduced another new aspect to their ever distinguishing signature sound on last year's monolithic EP, and that's Paolo Rossi's clean, high pitched vocals.  There seems to be a split amongst fans regarding the quality of his voice, and I stand firmly on the bad side.  This dude has an awful voice for what the band is doing.  I understand it's supposed to be this classy operatic thing over the chaos below, but it's done so poorly that I can't help but loathe it here.  On Mafia his two choruses were interesting touches, and while he didn't really sound all that great, they worked fantastically in the context of the songs and really helped give the band an identity.  What the band did with that identity is the equivalent of a man realizing that he's gay, and then proceeding to wear exclusively neon pink, see-thru mesh shirts, assless chaps, and Elton John sunglasses.  They took this one identifying feature and sculpted their entire personality around it.  It's annoying when a person does it and it's no different when a band does the same.  Virtually every track features his hilariously bad falsettos, and not a one of them keeps him within a reasonable range.  He is always straining his voice to go much higher than it can go, and it makes me wonder why he even did it in the first place.  His first passage on "Thru Our Scars" has him stretch for at least one note he clearly can't reach, but the rest stays in a range where his voice is at least bearable.  "The Violation", "The Deceit", and "The Hypocrisy" all showcase wonderfully how much of his lesson he didn't learn, as his note choice is even worse on this album and is overfeatured to high hell.  The worst part about it is that the vocals are weak in the first place.  It's bad enough that there's almost no power behind the screeching when he ISN'T spreading his voice far too thin.  They really ought to have kept this particular trait relegated to a track or two, and not given it a starring role.

Despite all this negativity, I still kind of like this album.  It's insanely hard for me to judge, as there is certainly a lot wrong with it, and my favorite aspect (the intensity) is overpowered completely by their newfound love (the orchestra).  And yet, I can still feel the old Fleshgod underneath, and even though it's fighting against meandering symphonics, it still shines through to this fan.  I think the lesson learned here is the age old "everything in moderation, kids".  The adolescent band experimented with a few substances and found one they thought improved them, and then proceeded to go completely overboard and OD.  Perhaps future works will show whether this particular overdose killed them or not, but it definitely addled them.  The once thundering juggernaut is now chumming around scuzzy old apartments, hitting up passers by for change.  You got your fix, Fleshgod, not clean yourself up and get back to being a weekend warrior.  You've shown that too much is detrimental to your abilities.


RATING - 66%